Where you get your information

A mind-boggling 25% of Australians say they are at least
“slightly interested” at the prospect of having a chip implanted
in their skin that could be used for payments, new research has
found.

The research by credit card company Visa
and the University of Technology Sydney found Australians are open to
the prospect of paying for items using wearable tech including smart
watches, rings, glasses and even a connected car. [emphasis added]

“Australians are among the world’s earliest adopters
of new technology,” Head of Emerging Products and Innovation for
Visa in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, George Lawson
said.

Think we’re being tracked and traced now? Why would you be
interested in not only taking the mark but for a cashless control
grid in the modern era of corruption we find ourselves swimming in?
This is not only trusting to the point of idiocy, it’s literally
voting for one’s own enslavement.
What happens when the government starts turning people’s chips
off for not falling in line and being good little statist citizens?
Have fun buying milk and bread then, Australians.

Eight of the
world’s top oil and gas producers have offered an intriguing glimpse
into a future of rusting oil rigs and gleaming solar panels.

A vision of old and new energy
sources, on what looks like a dried out seabed, dominate the front page
of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) website, a project launched
by BG Group, BP, Eni, Pemex, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Sinopec and Total.

They joined forces last week at
the Paris business and climate summit to emphasize their qualified
support for carbon cuts, and plan to reveal how they can contribute to
global efforts to address climate change in a report due out later this
year.

The oil giants – responsible for
25 million barrels of oil equivalent a day – a sixth of global
hydrocarbon production – say they want to “drive the sector forward” on
climate solutions.

Options discussed at a gathering
of the OGCI last week include cuts to gas flaring and methane emissions
from production facilities, together with work on measuring
climate-related impacts.

“Outcomes from the workshop will
help inform the OGCI’s first joint report that will be published ahead
of the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC
(COP21),” the group said in a statement.

It offers another signal that
after decades of blocking efforts to tackle climate change, some of the
world’s top fossil fuel producers are now acknowledge rising levels of
greenhouse gas emissions could be an issue.

Last week Saudi Arabia’s oil
minister said the country could be finished with fossil fuels by 2040 or
2050, and offered the thought it could turn to exporting solar power.

BP and Shell recently adopted
shareholder resolutions to force them to reveal if their assets will be
unburnable under tighter climate regulations.

Chevron and Exxon Mobil, which
are not part of the OGCI, have rejected calls to pull out of
carbon-intensive projects. And apart from Total, which has gas solar
projects in the US, South Africa, Chile and Abu Dhabi, other OGCI
members have insignificant renewable investments.

The “long term solutions” part
of the website talks about digital solutions or regulatory behavior. It
doesn’t mention the UN climate science panel’s warning that at the rate
of current emissions, in less than 30 years dangerous warming will be
locked into the world’s climate.

Many seasoned observers of
climate change talks have called the commitment of oil companies to
decarbonise into question, pointing to Shell’s plans to drill in the
Arctic this summer.

Environmentalist Jonathan
Porritt, who once advised BP on its environmental strategies, said it
was “impossible” for them to adapt to a world that needs to rapidly
slash emissions.

The UK’s former top climate
diplomat John Ashton has described Shell’s strategy of warning about
climate dangers yet continuing to explore as “narcissistic, paranoid and
psychopathic”.

But with the Paris summit fast
approaching, there appear to be efforts at senior UN levels to offer the
oil giants a way to bring solutions to the French capital.

At the 1996
World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international
community committed to reducing the number of hungry people in the world
by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion
of the hungry.

The latest State of World Food
Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2015 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), World Food Programme and International Fund for
Agricultural Development estimates almost 795 million people — one in
nine people worldwide — remain chronically hungry.

The number of undernourished
people — those regularly unable to consume enough food for an active and
healthy life — in the world has thus only declined by slightly over a
fifth from the 1010.6 million estimated for 1991 to 929.6 million in
2001, 820.7 million in 2011 and 794.6 million in 2014.

With the number of chronically
hungry people in developing countries declining from 990.7 million in
1991 to 779.9 million in 2014, their share in developing countries has
declined by 44.4 per cent, from 23.4 to 12.9 per cent over the 23 years,
but still short of the 11.7 per cent target.

Thus, the MDG 1c target of
halving the chronically undernourished’s share of the world’s population
by the end of 2015 is unlikely to be met at the current rate of
progress. However, meeting the target is still possible, with
sufficient, immediate, additional effort to accelerate progress,
especially in countries which have showed little progress thus far.

Overall progress has been highly
uneven. All but 15 million of the world’s hungry live in developing
countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in
reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased
in several cases.

By the end of 2014, 72 of the
129 developing countries monitored had reached the MDG 1c target — to
either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of
the chronically undernourished under five per cent. Several more are
likely to do so by the end of 2015.

Instead of halving the number of
hungry in developing regions by 476 million, this number was only
reduced by 221 million, just under half the earlier, more ambitious WFS
goal. Nevertheless, some 29 countries succeeded in at least halving the
number of hungry. This is significant as this shows that achieving and
sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.

Marked differences in
undernourishment persist across the regions. There have been significant
reductions in both the share and number of undernourished in most
countries in South-East Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and
the Caribbean — where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has
been reached.

While sub-Saharan Africa has the
highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia
has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished. West
Asia alone has seen an actual rise in the share of the hungry compared
to 1991, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania
has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

Despite the shortfall in
achieving the MDG1c target and the failure to get near the WFS goal of
halving the number of hungry, world leaders are likely to commit to
eliminating hunger and poverty by 2030 when they announce the post-2015
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the United Nations in September.

To be sure, there is enough food
produced to feed everyone in the world. However, hundreds of millions
of people do not have the means to access enough food to meet their
dietary energy needs, let alone what is needed for diverse diets to
avoid ‘hidden hunger’ by meeting their micronutrient requirements.

With high levels of deprivation,
unemployment and underemployment likely to prevail in the world in the
foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome by
2030 without universally establishing a social protection floor for all.
Such efforts will also need to provide the means for sustainable
livelihoods and resilience.

The Second International
Conference of Nutrition in Rome last November articulated commitments
and proposals for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition.
Improvements in nutrition will require sustained and integrated efforts
involving complementary policies, including improving health conditions,
food systems, social protection, hygiene, water supply and education.

It is widely acknowledged that there is more than sufficient food produced worldwide to meet all human needs. The paragraph in bold reaffirms that. We would add that attempting to refashion some aspects of capitalist principles to achieve the goal has been a regular and ongoing failure. Evidence shows that each time there is a review of the state of the millenium goals figures are cleverly manipulated to show progress, whatever the actual numbers reveal.

What is really needed if, as a global population, we are serious about eliminating hunger and poverty is the removal of the cause, thereby enabling us to deal with the situation immediately, not by 2030. Profits being the number one priority in capitalism are the reason that the hungry can't access food. To eliminate profit we must eliminate capitalism. Let's do it and get serious about feeding everyone now!

There is a group from Bangladesh called, Information Centre For Workers Freedom, which stands for
socialism/communism. Not very different from ourselves in ideas. No doubt there will be some differences about how to achieve socialism and perhaps certain divergence in
our analyses of contemporary society but they are definitely not Leninists
(quite the opposite in fact). As we have always argued, capitalism generates
the idea of socialism independently of the WSM. So it might be appropriate to re-post one particular article from their website.

The tobacco industry has been accused of “appalling
hypocrisy”, amid claims that it is fuelling the illicit trade in cigarette
smuggling to bolster its arguments against tax increases and other anti-smoking
measures. In a report published to coincide with World No Tobacco Day, the
pressure group ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) claimed that some tobacco
companies are flooding foreign markets with more products than there is demand.
The report said that when some of this tobacco is subsequently smuggled back to
the UK, it enables the companies to point to the dangers of a burgeoning
contraband trade and to say that measures such as increasing tax would only
serve to make legitimate cigarettes more expensive.

The World Health Organisation claimed: “The tobacco industry
covertly and overtly supports the illegal trade, from providing products to the
market, to working to block tobacco control by trying to convince governments
that measures like health warnings or tax increases will lead to more illicit
trade.”

Suspicions about oversupplying foreign markets to stimulate
a return trade in smuggling to the UK have been raised by organisations
including HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which has reported that the 2011
supply of some brands of rolling tobacco to some countries exceeded legitimate
demand by 240 per cent. In November, British American Tobacco was fined
£650,000 by HMRC for oversupplying cigarettes to Belgium, although the company
insisted it was “providing a perfectly legal supply to a legitimate demand” and
announced its intention to challenge the fine in court.

Meanwhile, Employment minister, Priti Patel, was once part of a team of spindoctors paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to help a tobacco giant counter
negative publicity. Patel’s job was to lobby MEPs against the introduction of
the EU tobacco control directive, which was introduced shortly after the new
millennium. She was charged with ensuring that a letter from the BAT chairman
at the time, Martin Broughton, outlining his objection to the directive, was
faxed to every MEP. BAT was charged £165 an hour for Patel’s services.

In addition to her work lobbying MEPs, Patel’s team played a
key role in fashioning the company’s public profile. In a memo dated 14
December 2000, a senior executive within the company, Andreas Vecchiet,
conducted an annual appraisal of the Shandwick team’s performance. “We have
mainly used Shandwick for project-based work relating to the WHO [World Health
Organisation] campaign, NGO monitoring … reputation issues relating to Burma,
and some limited advice relating to Nigeria and labour standards.”

BAT’s position in Burma at the turn of the millennium was
hugely controversial. “BAT’s factory in Burma was jointly owned with the
military dictatorship and so helped fund one of the most brutal military
dictatorships in the world,” said Anna Roberts, executive director at Burma
Campaign UK. “BAT refused to admit how much money it gave to the dictatorship,
but Burma Campaign UK estimated that BAT paid the generals $16m (£10m) in taxes
alone between 1999 and 2002. In contrast, BAT paid its factory workers in Burma
just £15 a month. The dictatorship spent 40% of its budget on the military.”

Saturday, May 30, 2015

The “Socialist Roots” of the UK’s Labour Party

by Richard Layton / May 29th, 2015

Mr Graham Peebles in his article, ‘A Lost Opportunity for Change‘ (Dissident Voice, May 28, 2015) appears to be living in a quite different part of the U.K. to the one I am familiar with. He states that the British Labour Party are, ‘frightened to be true to their socialist roots’ but fails to tell us how he defines ‘Socialist’.

Perhaps his definition includes the time when the Labour Government sent in troops to undermine striking Dock Workers? Perhaps he means by ‘Socialist’ the Labour Government building the Atomic Bomb without telling Parliament or even its own Members of Parliament? Maybe his definition of a ‘Socialist’ is millionaire Tony Blair who’s vivid imagination dreamt up ‘weapons of mass-destruction’?

Having lived under a number of Labour Governments my recollection is that when in power they are obliged by the constraints of the market system to run things in much the same way as the ‘nasty’ Tories—and that means restricting the rights of working people in favour of the holders of capital.

Now it is true that when first incorporated, the Labour Party did make favourable noises towards working people. Unfortunately, however, like many on the ‘Left’, it failed to understand the nature of the Capitalist system and believed that it could, by degrees, change it into a system which it called ‘Socialism’.

However the opposite occurred. Far from the Labour Party changing Capitalism by degrees, the Party was itself changed by Capitalism to become the full-blown pro-market pro-Capitalism political party that it is today.

The first mistake it made was in believing that state-ownership of the means of production, which it called ‘Nationalisation’ was ‘Socialism’ and that this equated to real common-ownership. The hypocrisy of this arrangement was highlighted by a legal case where in a particularly bad winter in tough times shortly after the war, a miner was prosecuted for taking a few lumps of coal home to keep his family warm.

He was prosecuted for theft and when, in his defence, he argued that he could not steal from himself as a co-owner of the mine, the court dismissed his plea on the grounds that the mines were owned by the King! And all this under a Labour Government!

In the Labour Party’s infamous Clause 4 of its Constitution, it talked of, ‘Common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. But genuine common ownership (unlike the mines example above) would entail the disappearance of ‘exchange’. In fact, real common ownership would mean the concept of ownership would disappear.

Nowadays, as Mr Peebles, in effect, concedes, the Labour Party avoids like the plague the use of the word ‘Socialism’ preferring to use even vaguer terms like ‘social justice’ and the like.

Mr Peeples uses the term, ‘clash of the new’ to describe the policies of such parties as the SNP and Plaid Cymru—parties that were founded respectively in 1934 and 1925! And since when has crude Nationalism been the answer to the problems of humankind?

Can he, for example, provide evidence that since Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, its respective workers have benefitted from ‘independence’? And who or what are they ‘independent’ from? The Market System? The U.S. Dollar? Recessions? Global Warming? War? Terrorism?

As for the ‘Greens’, they continue to support the very political/economic system that, in putting the profit of the few before the needs of the many, is the very cause of the pollution and global warming they rail against.

Finally, Mr Peebles seems to be besotted by the idea of women politicians as a magic formula for the world’s problems. No doubt he is thinking of such gentle feminists as Mrs Thatcher, Mrs Nehru, Mrs Bandaranaike and Mrs Marcos! A person’s gender is no guarantee as to whether that person’s views are rational or otherwise as his article sadly demonstrates.

Ukraine’s collapse since the February 2014 coup has
become an umbrella for grabitization. Collateral damage in this
free-for-all has been labor. Many workers are simply not getting paid,
and what actually is being paid is often illegally low.
Employers are taking whatever money is in their business accounts and
squirreling it away – preferably abroad, or at least in foreign
currency.
Wage arrears are getting worse, because as Ukraine approaches the eve
of defaulting on its €10+ billion London debt, kleptocrats and business
owners are jumping ship. They see that foreign lending has dried up and
the exchange rate will plunge further.
The Rada’s announcement last
week that it shifted €8 billion from debt service to spend on a new
military attack on the country’s eastern export region was the last
straw for foreign creditors and even for the IMF. Its loans helped
support the hryvnia’s exchange rate long enough for bankers, businessmen
and others to take whatever money they have and as many euros or
dollars as they can before the imminent collapse in June or July.

In this pre-bankruptcy situation, emptying out the store means not
paying workers or other bills. Wage arrears are reported to have reached
2 billion hryvnia, owed to over half a million workers. This has led
the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine to picket against the Cabinet
of Ministers on Wednesday (May 27). More demonstrations are scheduled
for the next two Wednesdays, June 3 and 10. According to union
federation Deputy Head Serhiy Kondratiuk, “the current subsistence wage
of UAH 1,218 is 60% less than the level set in Ukrainian law, which is
confirmed by the calculations if the Social Policy Ministry. … the
subsistence wage in the country should exceed UAH 3,500 a month, but the
government refuses to hold social dialog to revise standards.”

Emptying out Ukrainian business bank accounts will leave empty
shells. With Ukraine’s economy broken, the only buyers with serious
money are European and American. Selling to foreigners is thus the only
way for managers and owners to get a meaningful return – paid in foreign
currency safely in offshore accounts, outside of future Ukrainian
clawback fines. Privatization and capital flight go together.
So does short-changing labor. The new buyers will reorganize the
assets they buy, declare the old firms bankrupt and erase their wage
arrears, along with any other bills that are owed. The restructured
companies will claim that bankruptcy has wiped out whatever the former
firms (or public enterprises) owed to workers. It is much like what
corporate raiders do in the United States to wipe out pension
obligations and other debts. They will claim to have to “saved”
Ukrainian economy and “made it competitive.”

The Pinochet coup in Chile was a dress rehearsal for all this. The
U.S.-backed military junta targeted labor leaders, journalists, and
potential political leaders, as well as university professors (closing
every economics department in Chile except for the Chicago “free
market”-based Catholic University). You cannot have a “free market”
Chicago-style, after all, without taking such totalitarian steps.
U.S. strategists like to name such ploys after predatory birds: Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, and Operation Condor in Latin America that targeted “lefties,” intellectuals and
others. A similar program is underway against Ukraine’s Russian
speakers. I don’t know the code word being used, so let’s call it
Operation Vulture.
For labor leaders, the problem is not only to collect back wages, but
to survive with a future living wage. If they refrain from protesting,
they simply won’t get paid. This is why they are organizing a growing
neo-Maidan protest explicitly onbehalf of wage earners – so that the junta’s Right
Sector snipers cannot accuse the demonstrators of being pro-Russian. The
unions have protected themselves by seeking support from the UN’s
International Labour Organization (ILO), and from the International
Trade Union Confederation in Brussels.

The most effective tactic to tackle the corruption that is permitting
the non-payment of wages and pensions is to focus on the present
regime’s foreign support, especially from the IMF and EU. Using labor’s
grievances as an umbrella to demand related reforms could include
warnings that any sale of Ukrainian land, raw materials, public
utilities or other assets to foreign buyers can be reversed by future,
less corrupt governments.

In labor’s favor is the fact that the IMF has violating its Articles
of Agreement by lending for military purposes. As soon as its last loan
was disbursed, Poroshenko announced that he was stepping up his war
against the East. This brings the IMF loan close to being what legal
theorists call an Odious Debt: debts to a junta taking power and looting
the government’s Treasury and other assets in the public domain,
leaving future governments to pay off what has been stolen.
Labor’s fight for a living wage is not only for retroactive
shortfalls, but to put in place a recovery plan to protect against the
economy being treated like Greece or Latvia, neoliberal style. U.S.
strategists have been discussing whether they could dismiss the $3
billion that Ukraine owes Russia this December as an “odious debt”; or,
perhaps, classify it as “foreign aid” and hence not collectible in
practice. Ironic as it may seem, the Peterson Institute of International
Economics, George Soros and other Cold Warriors have provided future
Ukrainian governments with a repertory of legal reasons to reconstitute
their economy foreign-debt free – leaving the government able to pay
wage and pension arrears.
The alternative is for international creditors to win the case for
putting foreign bondholders, the IMF and European Union first, and sovereign rights to prevent self-destruction second.

Fresh revelations that yet another round of United Nations climate
talks—this time the upcoming negotiations in Paris—will be sponsored by
some of the very corporations driving global warming have been met with
outrage and alarm that the global process continues to be “captured by big polluters.”

Pierre-Henri Guignard, Secretary-General of the UN Conference of the
Parties 21 (COP21), unveiled the list of corporate sponsors on
Wednesday. “We are building a very business friendly COP which will show
the commitment of the private sector to the spirit of the convention,”
he stated.

But climate justice advocates say that by being “business friendly,”
the conference is, in fact, hostile to the public good—and the planet
itself.

“Today’s announcement of the corporate sponsors of the COP21 exposes
the deep contradiction in UN COP process and their cozy relationship
with the very corporations who are driving the climate crisis,” Cindy
Wiesner of the U.S.-based Grassroots Global Justice Alliance told Common Dreams.
“The effort of these corporations to green-wash their ongoing damage of
the planet in order increase profit and gain public support is
offensive.”

The French government claims the private sector will foot a large
portion of the bill—as much as 20 percent—for the conference, according
to a senior foreign ministry official cited by AFP.

According to Pascoe Sabido of Corporate Europe Observatory, this
historically high level of private funding bodes poorly for the talks:
“Twenty percent of private funding is more than at the COP19 in Warsaw
in 2013. Back then, NGOs, social movements and trade unions left the
negotiations to protest the takeover of the talks by industry and
polluting lobbies.”

And who are the corporations financing the November 30th to December 11th conference—purportedly held to
“achieve a new international agreement on the climate, applicable to
all countries, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C?”
They include the French energy companies Engie and EDF, whose coal plants, according to Malika Peyraut of Friends of the Earth, “are equivalent to nearly half of France’s entire emissions.”
They also include the French bank BNP-Paribas, which “accounts for
half of the total support—now totaling more than 30 billion
euros—provided by French banks to the coal industry between 2005 and
April 2014,” according to the global NGO network Bank Track.

The 20 corporate sponsors revealed by Guignard on Wednesday
constitute just the first group, with many more to come. For years,
civil society and social movement organizations around the world have
sounded the alarm about the heavy role of corporations in UN climate
talks—a reality that has prompted the organization of alternative
“People’s Summits,” including the grassroots gathering in Lima, Peru last year.
Climate justice advocates say that the financial backers of the Paris talks unveiled so far already pose a grave threat.

“The
public interest demands that these talks not be polluted by the private
interests represented by these companies. Would we entrust the fight
against tobacco to cigarette manufacturers? Why do it for climate
policy?” said Maxime Combes, ATTAC France

On 26 June 2013, a high-level delegation from the American Chambers
of Commerce (AmCham) visited EU trade officials to insist that the bloc
drop its planned criteria for identifying EDCs in favour of a new impact
study.
Minutes of the meeting show commission officials pleading that
“although they want the TTIP to be successful, they would not like to be
seen as lowering the EU standards”.

The TTIP is a trade deal being agreed by the EU and US to remove barriers to commerce and promote free trade.
Responding to the EU officials, AmCham representatives “complained
about the uselessness of creating categories and thus, lists” of
prohibited substances, the minutes show.
The US trade representatives insisted that a risk-based approach be
taken to regulation, and “emphasised the need for an impact assessment”
instead.

On 2 July 2013, officials from the US Mission to Europe visited the
EU to reinforce the message. Later that day, the secretary-general of
the commission, Catherine Day, sent a letter to the environment
department’s director Karl Falkenberg, telling him to stand down the
draft criteria.
“We suggest that as other DGs [directorate-generals] have done, you
consider making a joint single impact assessment to cover all the
proposals,” Day wrote. “We do not think it is necessary to prepare a
commission recommendation on the criteria to identify endocrine
disrupting substances.”

The result was that legislation planned for 2014 was kicked back until at least 2016, despite estimated health costs of €150bn per year
in Europe from endocrine-related illnesses such as IQ loss, obesity and
cryptorchidism – a condition affecting the genitals of baby boys.
A month before the meeting, AmCham had warned the EU of
“wide-reaching implications” if the draft criteria were approved. The
trade body wanted an EU impact study to set looser thresholds for
acceptable exposure to endocrines, based on a substance’s potency.
“We are worried to see that this decision, which is the source of
many scientific debates, might be taken on political grounds, without
first assessing what its impacts will be on the European market,” the
chair of AmCham’s environment committee wrote in a letter to the
commission.
These could be “dramatic” the letter said.

In a high-level internal note sent to the health commissioner, Tonio
Borg, shortly afterwards, his departmental director-general warned that
the EU’s endocrines policy “will have substantial impacts for the
economy, agriculture and trade”.

Bosses
at the world’s big five oil companies have been showered with bonus
payouts linked to a $1tn (£650bn) crescendo of spending on fossil fuel
exploration and extraction over nine years, according to Guardian
analysis of company reports.

The unprecedented push to bring untapped reserves into production,
and to exploit new and undiscovered fields, involves some of the most
complex feats of engineering ever attempted. It also reflects how
confident Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, Total and BP are that demand will remain high for decades to come.
The big oil groups are pressing ahead with investments despite the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimating that two-thirds of proven fossil fuel reserves will need to remain in the ground to
prevent the earth from warming 2C above pre-industrial levels – a
proposed temperature limit beyond which scientists warn of spiralling
and irreversible climate change.

Multi-billion-dollar capital projects amount to huge, long-term bets
by the big five that exorbitant costs associated with unlocking
hydrocarbon reserves in some of the most inaccessible locations on the
planet can eventually be recouped and converted into profits.

Bonuses for chief executives at all five firms are tied to the
achievement of delivery milestones in the construction and deployment of
such projects.
Shell’s Ben van Beurden,
for example, last year received a pay deal worth $32.2m, including
bonuses linked to delivering “a high proportion of flagship projects on
time and on budget”. These are thought to include four platforms
floating 1,000 metres or more above deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Guinea and South China Sea.
Similarly, BP’s Bob Dudley was awarded a pay deal worth $15.3m, with bonuses linked to seven “major projects”, thought to include Sunrise, a tar sands joint venture in Canada, as well as projects in Angola, Azerbaijan, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.
The boss of Exxon, Rex Tillerson,
was paid $33.1m last year including bonus payouts linked to projects
including the first well in the Kara Sea, in the Russian Arctic, and the
expansion of the Kearl tar sands operations in northern Alberta,
Canada.

The Guardian asked each of the big five about the appropriateness of
linking bonuses to capital spending given the looming threat posed by
climate change. Shell said pay for Van Beurden “reflects delivery of
company strategy, measured by both short-term and long-term targets”.
Chevron said
executive rewards were “strongly tied to corporate performance and
directly linked to increases in shareholder value”. Exxon Mobil and BP
declined to respond, while Total did not answer.

Friday, May 29, 2015

With at least a dozen people dead and the raging high waters described as having “tsunami-type power” in Texas over the Memorial Day weekend, the latest example of extreme weather in the U.S. is being tied to a global pattern of increasingly volatile events that are claiming lives and costing billions of dollars in damage each year.
As Texas Gov. Greg Abbott expanded
the range of a declared disaster zone in his state today, neighboring
Oklahoma is also coping with an emergency response to flash floods and
overflowing rivers.
Marking the official end of a four-year long drought in the
south-central part of the country, the storms may be filling the
region’s diminished reservoirs, but not without a high cost.

As the nation’s media focuses on the acute damage to property and
loss of life, an international conference sponsored by the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO), which kicked off in Switzerland
yesterday, may shed additional light on the impact that human-caused climate change is having on the planet’s highly-dynamic weather patterns.
With the title of ‘Facing Up to Climate Change, Extreme Weather,′ the
WMO conference is asking the world’s foremost meteorologists to weigh
in on how increased atmospheric and ocean temperatures created by carbon
and other heat-trapping gases affect the planet’s weather patterns.“So far in 2015—as in preceding years—weather-related disasters have destroyed or disrupted millions of lives and livelihoods,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud ahead of the meeting. Citing devastating events like Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu, major droughts
in India, California, and Brazil, and the kind of flooding that
recently struck Chile and now being seen in Texas, Jarraud said the
“list of extreme events is long and there is growing scientific evidence
that at least some of them would have been unlikely without
human-induced climate change.”

With the next round of UN climate talks slated for later this year in Paris,
Jarraud affirmed that the WMO’s efforts will be aimed at addressing the
threat of increasingly extreme weather caused by global warming. “It is
a pivotal year for action on behalf of future generations,” he said.
“We have more than a responsibility. We have a moral duty to take action
to limit climate change. If we don’t do it we will be judged by our
children and our grandchildren.”

According to Haaretz:

There is no argument that the planet has undergone many a climatic
change in its 4.5-billion year history, but most scientists agree that
this time is different. To name just one indicator, never before has the
level of atmospheric carbon dioxide climbed as rapidly as in the last
century, since the industrial revolution really took off. This month
atmospheric CO2 reached 400 parts per million, a concentration last seen
before man even began to evolve some 2.5 million years ago.
And while the cause of any individual weather event is debatable, a pattern has emerged, and it isn’t business as usual.

The weekend’s weather was also attributed in part to the naturally
occurring phenomenon known as El Niño. But with the planet experiencing
increasing warming due to humanity’s continued emission of greenhouse
gases, the current experience of those living in Texas and
Oklahoma—intense flooding caused by heavy rains after prolonged periods
of drought—is just one of the expected dangers that climate scientists
have long warned about.

As ThinkProgress reported on Monday:

Going from one extreme to another is a hallmark of climate change.
Scientists predict more droughts in the coming decades, as well as more
intense rainstorms. In the midwest, the number of storms that drop more
than three inches of rain have increased by 50 percent, according to an analysis from the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Texas and Oklahoma both face intensifying drought and flooding, although politicians in both states have denied
climate change. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council,
Texas “has yet to formally address climate change preparedness”—one of
only 12 states to not have taken any steps toward addressing the impacts
of climate change on water resources.“Between more intense rainstorms and sea level rise, flooding will only increase if we don’t address climate change,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Who the 'we' is in the calls for addressing climate change is not made too clear, however we the people all over the world have been calling for this issue to be addressed for some time now. 'We' are paid little attention. 'They', corporations and lobbyists throw money at politicians so they also largely ignore public opinion. The capitalist system is bolstered by 'them' and 'their' main interest is in making more profit so 'we' have little hope of being heard on this and any other topic. It's time to grasp the nettle and recognise the only action that can halt capitalism's ills is the total abolition of the system that allows and sustains this division of 'us' and 'them.' We are many, they are few. Together anything is possible.

Are we going to let capitalism destroy life on Earth?
According to 99 percent of climate scientists – we'll know by the end of the century.

Scientists have agreed for three decades about what is causing
atmospheric temperatures to rise – humans are burning Earth's carbon
resources to fuel economic activity. But even before we knew what was causing the temperature to rise –
scientists warned about the dire global impacts of a two degree increase
in atmospheric temperatures.

Earth's climate has been basically stable for hundreds of thousands of years.
But that changed during the industrial revolution - when Great Britain realized the potential of coal-powered steam engines.
Soon continental Europe and the US followed suit.And more than 150 years later – coal, oil and natural gas dominate
the global politics and economics: wars are fought over oil; communities
are destroyed for coal; and increasingly scarce water supplies are
poisoned by natural gas extraction.

The Earth has already warmed about one degree Celsius above
pre-industrial levels - which means we have to change our energy system
completely before the Earth warms another degree in order to avoid the
catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Is it possible? Scientists say "Yes!" - BUT it will require us to take bold and immediate steps towards a completely renewable energy system.
The technology exists – the shortfall is in investment.
According to the IMF – oil companies get $5.3 trillion in subsidies worldwide per year. And the oil companies pay only a portion – if any – of the
environmental costs of ripping fossil fuels from the ground and burning
the CO2 into the atmosphere.
In other words, every living human being and government are paying
for coal, oil, and gas companies to profit from the destruction our
planet.
And that's not a market failure – that's how the market was set up.

Capitalism as we know it isn't the solution – it's the problem.

In a report in "Nature Climate Change" – scientists point out that we
can keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius – if every country
takes bold and immediate action to deploy current clean energy and limit
the use of fossil fuels.

Burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon into our atmosphere has
very real costs that corporations aren't paying for – costs that are
being kicked down the road for future generations.

In the US, we've let the fossil fuel industry become so profitable
that it relentlessly funds campaigns and lobbies to keep oil subsidies
in place and weaken environmental regulations - all at the expense of
our communities and our planet. Our current oligarchs claim that renewable power isn't efficient or
cheap enough to be competitive or to reliably replace fossil fuels – but
that's just not true. Solar, wind, and wave technology are all ready to be deployed at
large scales – and Denmark, Germany, the UK and China, among others, are
doing it right now. Our transportation system is ready for renewables – solar roadways in
the Netherlands are proving more effective than expected – and over two
dozen models of electric cars are now out on the market.
Our households are ready for renewables: LED lightbulbs and high
efficiency appliances mean that households use less energy – and
affordable rooftop solar means that households can meet a lot their own
energy needs.

We can make renewables competitive if we just cut subsidies to oil
and coal companies and enforce our clean air and clean water regulations
– but that means getting money out of politics so that legislation is
written in the interest of communities and the planet - instead of
corporations.

Capitalism is great at creating profits and products – but it doesn't care about environmental justice.

Capitalism doesn't care whether we restore our forests and soils so
that the planet can begin to reabsorb the carbon we've dumped into the
atmosphere.

Capitalism doesn't care whether streams are poisoned or if the air is
noxious – it doesn't care if a river burns because of pollution – and
it doesn't care if another technology is 'cleaner' - unless the 'dirty'
option becomes unprofitable.

Capitalism is to make money - but a government like our republic is
put into place to protect the people from those whose quest for money
harms society. We cannot replace democratic government with capitalism –
and climate change proves this.

In fact - climate change challenges capitalism at its very root – is
an economy really growing when all the costs are dumped on society while
a handful of corporations and billionaires take all the profits?
Science says that we can keep global temperatures from rising another
half degree – but it can't be left to a private sector that makes its
profits from leaving the costs to everybody else.

The article above seems to hit the nail on the head but then wanders off topic by seemingly endorsing 'a nicer kind' of capitalism - bring it to heel with more regulation and by preventing huge profits to be take by 'those whose quest for money harms society'. By now we all should have realised that capitalism is not going to be reined in. To quote from above 'Capitalism is about making money.' Then surely the obvious answer is to cut out that as a possibility by abandoning the monetary method of organising production, distribution and everything else in our lives in favour of an egalitarian moneyless society in which all have free and open access to the necessities of life - and in which the planet can prosper.Capitalism must go.

In a historic victory for marriage equality, Ireland has become the
first country in the world to approve same-sex marriage via popular
vote. By a 62-to-38 margin, the people of Ireland voted a resounding
"yes" for equality in a national referendum on Friday. This signals what
some are calling a "social revolution" in the traditionally
conservative Catholic country. Ireland’s constitution will now be
amended to say that two people can marry "without distinction as to
their sex."

The turnout was one of the highest in the country’s history
and came after a robust civic campaign led by human rights activists,
trade unions, celebrities and employers. Ireland’s referendum reflects a
sea change in a country where homosexuality was decriminalized just two
decades ago and where 70 percent of the population still identifies as
Roman Catholic. We are joined from Belfast, Northern Ireland, by Gavin
Boyd, the policy and advocacy manager at The Rainbow Project.

An interview by 'Democracy Now' with campaigners, voters and officials in Ireland follows here.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

In
recent days, images of a ‘counter extremism’ test set specifically for
Muslim school children by UK schools have been shared widely across
social media. The case highlights a deepening prejudice towards the
Muslim community across the Western world which echoes the hysteria of
McCarthy era America.

In the time of the ‘Islamist Threat’, every Muslim is a latent
terrorist, prone to ‘radicalization’ at any moment. And if you think I’m
laying it on a bit thick, just look at the comments by Britain’s most senior Muslim police commander Mak Chishty.
In a recent interview with the Guardian,
Chishty said there was now a need for “a move into the private space”
of Muslims to spot views that could show the beginning of radicalisation
from the age of five-years-old. Asked to define what
sort of behavior would be worthy of suspicion, Chishty responded with a
list of activities which included:

Certainly, Chishty is enforcing the will of his political masters, and this goes right to the top.
Speaking to the National Security Council
earlier this month about the introduction of his new Counter Extremism
Bill, British Prime Minister David Cameron spoke perhaps the most
anti-democratic words uttered by a British Prime Minister in history,
saying:

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society,
saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you
alone.”
“This government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach.”

Within this mindset, the core principles of democracy are forgotten.
Worse, actively twisted into authoritarianism. Dissent becomes treason.
Protest becomes extremism. And at the centre, every Muslim becomes
suspect – right down to school children. In this paranoid context, the
interrogation of children with this ‘counter extremism test’ is accepted
as prudent and appropriate. People don’t ask questions about the
racism, the invasion of privacy, or indeed the long term impacts.

It is simply unacceptable for anyone who claims a shred of fidelity to
the principles of democracy to back these measures. How many times must
we go through this process before we become immune to the efforts of
political and media propagandists bent on dividing us into opposing
camps? One need only pick up a history book to find several examples
from living memory – Japanese Americans during World War II, the Red
Scare, the Nazi holocaust, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. All done in the name of protecting and expanding freedom and
democracy, all of which merely trashed the principles of both.

There is a certain irony at play here, because Democracy is
absolutely at threat today. But the threat does not come from Islamic
Extremists with Kalashnikovs and Korans. It comes from
politicians with censorship and propaganda. taken from here

Yesterday, President Barack Obama delivered remarks before
a Memorial Day service at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia, in which he
celebrated the day as the first Memorial Day since the end of the war in
Afghanistan.

For many of us, this Memorial Day is especially meaningful; it
is the first since our war in Afghanistan came to an end. Today is the
first Memorial Day in 14 years that the United States is not engaged in a
major ground war. So on this day, we honor the sacrifice of the
thousands of American servicemembers—men and women—who gave their lives
since 9/11, including more than 2,200 American patriots who made the
ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan.

Our war in Afghanistan came to an end. Well, sort of.
The United States and NATO did formally end the war in Afghanistan,
amidst some ceremony, in December 2014. However, in many ways, it is
hard to see that the changing of the guard was little more than the
changing of a flag. And President Obama’s own Justice Department—for its
part—is busily arguing in court that the war is not, in fact, over.
In the United States’ opposition
to a Guantanamo Bay detainee’s “End of War” motion, the President’s
lawyers write, “active hostilities” are continuing against the Taliban
in Afghanistan, and that the President and the Congress are “in
agreement” that this is the case:

As a matter of international and domestic law, the United
States currently remains in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, Taliban,
and associated forces. Petitioner Mukhtar Yahia al Warafi (ISN 117), a
Guantanamo Bay detainee previously determined by this Court to be part
of Taliban forces, incorrectly contends that his detention at Guantanamo
Bay has become unlawful because he alleges the United States’ armed
conflict against the Taliban in Afghanistan ended at the close of 2014.
. . .
[T]he
determination of whether hostilities have ended is a matter “of
political judgement for which judges have neither technical competence
nor official responsibility.” Ludecke v. Watkins, 335 U.S. 160,
170 (1948). With respect to the current armed conflict against
al-Qaeda, Taliban, and associated forces, both political branches are in
agreement, through Congress’s continued statutory authority and the
Executive’s posture and military actions undertaken pursuant to that
authority, that active hostilities against those forces have not ceased.
. . .
Petitioner
. . . misunderstands the meaning of the President’s public statements
in December 2014 announcing that “[t]his month, our combat mission” and
“America’s war in Afghanistan will come to a responsible end.” The
President has not declared that active hostilities against al-Qaeda,
Taliban, and associated forces have ceased or that the fighting in
Afghanistan has stopped. Rather, the President’s public statements made
clear that, in light of continuing threats faced by the United States in
Afghanistan, counterterrorism and other military operations would
continue even after the end of the combat mission. Simply put, the
President’s statements signify a transition in United States military
operation, not a cessation.

In effect, the Justice Department is arguing that the President does
not quite mean what he says when he says the war was over. What he means
is that “military operations” will continue after the “combat mission”
is over.
The war is over. Long live the war.

The Justice Department is not the only agency making this argument.
In an April speech, Department of Defense General Counsel Stephen
Preston clarified the point further,
stating “Although our presence in that country [Afghanistan] has been
reduced and our mission there is more limited, the fact is that active
hostilities continue. As a matter of international law, the United
States remains in a state of armed conflict against the Taliban,
al-Qa’ida and associated forces, and the 2001 AUMF continues to stand as
statutory authority to use military force.”
And in many ways, the Justice Department and the Defense Department
are more right than the President. The war continues for the Afghans,
the war continues for the Taliban, and for many Americans, the war also
continues. Fierce fighting in the country has killed record numbers of
Afghan security forces over the last year. In March, the United States
agreed to slow the withdraw of U.S. troops from the country.

Before that, in February, the New York Times reported that the United States was escalating a secret war in Afghanistan.
Airstrikes continue aplenty; night raids throughout the the country
have reached a fever pitch.”It’s all in the shadows now,” One Afghan
security official told the Times. “The official war for the
Americans—the part of the war that you could go see—that’s over. It’s
only the secret war that’s still going. But it’s going hard.”
That was confirmed by another Times report from the end of April. In March alone, the United States launched 52 airstrikes:

Rather than ending the American war in Afghanistan, the
military is using its wide latitude to instead transform it into a
continuing campaign of airstrikes—mostly drone missions—and Special
Operations raids that have in practice stretched or broken the
parameters publicly described by the White House.

How do we square the circle of the war’s being over except that it isn’t? Perhaps, the clearest summation of the situation came from the commander expanding the secret war, General John F. Campbell in a New York Times story:

“Washington is
going to have to say what they say politically for many different
audiences, and I have no issue with that,” General Campbell said. “I
understand my authorities and what I have to do with Afghanistan’s
forces and my forces. And if that doesn’t sell good for a media piece
then, again, I can’t worry about it.”

He added: “Combat and war and transition, as you know, it’s a very complex thing. For me, it’s not black and white.”

Recognizing that final point, the very transitional nature of modern day warfare, yesterday the President acknowledged that
“the nature of war has changed.” Instead, it is only the “the values
that drive our brave men and women in uniform [that] remain constant:
Honor, courage, selflessness.”

As war continues to ravage Yemen, at least 16 million people—nearly
two-thirds of the country's population—are now without access to clean
water, a humanitarian crisis that threatens to escalate, Oxfam warned on
Monday.
According to a statement
released by the international aid group, "People are being forced to
drink unsafe water as a result of the disintegration of local water
systems, bringing the real risk of life-threatening illnesses, such as
malaria, cholera, and diarrhea."
"Yemen's hospitals are in no condition to adequately cope with an outbreak of a water-borne disease," the organization stated.

In addition, the price of water that is trucked in from other areas
has tripled, making it an unfeasible alternative for most Yemenis. Prior
to the airstrike campaign, which began March 26, 2015, trucked water
cost $9 in the western governorate of Al Hudaydah. It now costs $36.
Al Hudaydah and nearby Hajjah have seen 40 percent of their water systems shut down.
Roughly 13 million people in Yemen were already without access to
clean water before the war began, with estimates from previous years warning that the capital city of Sanaa could be without "economically viable water supplies" by 2017.
That means it has taken only seven weeks of bombings, ground
fighting, and blocking of humanitarian aid to cut off water access for
an additional three million people.

Without a ceasefire between Houthi factions and the Saudi Arabia-led
coalition—which includes the U.S., Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab
Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, and Morocco—the crisis is
unlikely to let up, and it will be civilians who pay the price, Oxfam
warned.
"If the fighting, the fuel shortages, the lack of medical supplies,
lack of sleep due to bombing, and the spiraling prices were not enough,
now nearly two thirds of Yemenis are at risk of being without clean
water or sanitation services," said Grace Ommer, country director for
Yemen Oxfam.
She added: "This is equivalent to the populations of Berlin, London,
Paris and Rome combined, all rotting under heaps of garbage in the
streets, broken sewage pipes and without clean water for the seventh
consecutive week."

Seven weeks of bombing by the coalition has not only caused extensive
damage to civilian infrastructure in Yemen, it has displaced about half
a million people—in turn compounding the growing water crisis, Oxfam
said in a media briefing (pdf) last week.
On Monday, Ommer repeated Oxfam's plea to end the military assault and give Yemenis a chance to recover from the crisis.
"Yemen needs an urgent ceasefire, and the opening of trade routes so
vital supplies can enter the country to allow for the rebuilding and
revamping of the water infrastructure," Ommer said. "Anything short of
this will usher a health disaster to add to the pile of miseries that
Yemenis are facing."
"Yemenis have the right to a better life, but they face an increasing
risk of life threatening illness and disease," Oxfam stated on Monday.
"This is a direct infringement of their right to health and wellbeing,
as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

About 2.5 million Australians are living below the poverty
line, according to a Salvation Army report. It found on average, people had
just under $18 a day to live on after paying for accommodation. The Salvation
Army said the results painted an alarming picture of what was happening to many
marginalised Australians.

The survey found 75 per cent of respondents had cut down on
basic necessities, 59 per cent had delayed or were unable to pay utility bills
and 57 per cent had gone without meals. It also found 68 per cent of those
surveyed went without dental treatment and 37 per cent went without medical
treatment.

One doesn’t have to be a professional historian or
archivist to appreciate just how virulently skewed the U.S. judicial
system has been in its dealings with working people. One doesn’t have to
be a legal scholar to acknowledge that moneyed interests have always
been provided with their own form of “justice.” All one has to do is pay
attention.
From Day One, the federal courts and Supreme Court have taken the
side of employers, peddlers, merchants, plantation owners,
industrialists, entrepreneurs, bankers, and any other remotely
Establishment agent (including law enforcement officials) who more or
less stands in opposition to the interests of the working masses. Not to
get all “Marxian” here, but it’s true.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, whom do federal judges
typically pal around with? The Country Club set, or men and women who
actually toil for a living? Indeed, if it happened to be the latter, it
could be the opening of a classic joke: “A welder, bricklayer and
federal judge are drinking together in a bar….”

Granted, the High Court has thrown the occasional bone in the direction
of the “proletariat,” but that gesture has usually been in the form of
extending due process or some other civil libertarian right to the
underdog. It’s different when it comes to money and property. In matters
involving economic hegemony, workers have historically been pissed on
from a great height.

One example of just how “corporate-minded” the judiciary has always
been is the application of the landmark Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) in
the Danbury Hatters Case (1908). While liberals loved passage of the
Sherman Act because they finally had something on the books that
thwarted monopolies and price-fixing, the manner in which the Supreme
Court interpreted the Act was a mind-blower.

Briefly, the facts are these: When a labor union, the United Hatters
of North America, tried to organize a hat factory—D.E. Loewe and
Company, located in Danbury, Connecticut—the company unceremoniously
rebuffed them (officials refused even to meet with the union).
Accordingly, the United Hatters called a strike.
And when D.E. Loewe and Company hired scabs to replace the striking
workers, the hatters swung into action. With the assistance of the
influential AFL (American Federation of Labor), they launched a public
relations campaign, urging the company’s retail outlets not to carry
Loewe’s merchandise. Apparently, the proposed boycott worked
extraordinarily well. Customers balked and orders shrank.
But D.E. Loewe took its case all the way to the Supreme Court. They
argued that the AFL’s boycott violated the “restraint of trade”
provision laid out in the Sherman Act, and incredibly, the U.S. Supreme
Court bought the argument. The Court basically stated that anything that
resulted in significantly impeding a commercial venture—including
strikes and boycotts—was illegal under the Sherman Act.
Not content to simply win, D.E. Loewe filed a lawsuit against the
union, demanding compensation. Citing the Sherman Act, a lower court
awarded Loewe triple damages (triple!!), to be paid by members of the
United Hatters. Bank accounts were attached and home foreclosures were
threatened. Naturally, the union appealed, but the Supreme Court, in
1915, upheld the decision. So much for workers’ rights.

The Danbury Hatters Case was just one of many anti-labor decisions
passed down by the courts. There were dozens of others. It wasn’t until
1932, with passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Act (which forbid judges from
arbitrarily issuing strike injunctions), that things began looking up,
and it wasn’t until 1935, with passage of the Wagner Act, that organized
labor finally gained a place at the table.
Still, even with Wagner in effect, organized labor’s status was
precarious. In fact, labor’s “glory days” lasted barely 12 years. In
1947, the Taft-Hartley Act altered many of the Wagner Act’s provisions,
including making “right to work” states legal and making secondary
boycotts illegal.
By passing Taft-Hartley, the U.S. Congress demonstrated that it was equally as hostile to labor as the courts were.

Unfortunately, boycotts (even the legal, modestly ambitious ones)
don’t usually work today because we’ve become too fragmented and diluted
(in union jargon: “corpuscular”) as a nation. It’s hard to mobilize and
harder yet to maintain discipline.
But even if we did become unified, even if by some crazy happenstance
working people (the bottom 80-percent), in a splashy show of
solidarity, were able to put a dent in the nation’s commerce, it would
be illegal. President Obama would invoke Taft-Hartley and make everybody
go back to work.
Working people have no leverage. They aren’t allowed to engage in
meaningful strikes, they aren’t allowed to engage in meaningful
boycotts, and they aren’t even allowed to keep their jobs during a
walkout. Doesn’t that give a whole new meaning to the term “stacked
deck”?

YouGov's latest research shows that when Americans are asked whether they have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of socialism and capitalism, capitalism comes out on top. 52% of Americans have a favorable view of capitalism, while only 26% have a favorable view of socialism. Among younger Americans, however, attitudes are a lot more divided. 36% of under-30s have a positive view of socialism, while 39% have a positive view of capitalism. Among over-65s, who came of age at the height of the Cold War, only 15% look upon socialism favorably while 59% have a like capitalism.

With all the attention here in Turkey being focused on the upcoming June
7th parliamentary elections, the strike by thousands of workers in
Turkey's automobile production sector, concentrated in the northwest
provinces of Bursa and Kocaeli, caught everyone by surprise. For those
of our readers who did not know, Turkey has a significant vehicle
manufacturing industry. In 2014, 1.17 million cars and commercial
vehicles were produced. In fact, it is the backbone of Turkey's export
sector with a yearly value of nearly 23 billion dollars. So when auto
production is virtually shut down, as it was for the past week or two,
this is big news.

We
spent most of our working lives in the U.S. working union
jobs, as steelworkers and railroad workers, although we did our time in
non-union workplaces as well. We are well aware of the sorry plight of
unions in the U.S. but, believe us when we say that we were privileged
to work under union contracts. In spite of how bad our union leadership
might have been, and it was about as bad as it could be, workplace
safety, wages, benefits and job security was better than for the
overwhelming majority of workers without union representation.

Previously, we have written about the long hours, low pay and dismal
working conditions of the Turkish working class. The deaths of workers
in the mines and on construction sites are some of the highest in the
world. The 301 coal miners who died in a mining disaster in the town of
Soma a year ago have become a national symbol of the life-and-death
issues that workers here face every day they go to work. The unexpected
downing of tools by thousands of autoworkers here in the midst of the
election campaign has again brought the issue of workers' wages and
working conditions forcefully back onto the national agenda. More than
that, it has highlighted the demand of the workers to be represented by
unions of their choice, free from company or government control.

The strikes in auto here have been wildcat strikes, organized by the
rank-and-file without notice and without the approval of their union
leaders. Workers at Oyak Renault (a joint venture with the Turkish
military's pension fund) and Tofaş (a joint Fiat/Koç Holding venture),
Ford Otosan as well as major parts suppliers and Türk Traktör stopped
production for more than a week. Oyak Renault and Tofaş produce some 40%
of Turkey's export vehicles. While most have now gone back to work
having negotiated concessions from the companies in wages and working
conditions, Renault workers at Turkey's biggest car factory have
rejected the company's offer and remain on strike. Thousands of workers
have resigned from their company 'union', frustrated and angry that it
did not represent their interests. Forty-seven strike leaders have been
summoned to court by a prosecutor, accused of organizing an illegal
work-stoppage. To be able to understand these developments, readers
should be aware that most unions in Turkey were effectively smashed in
the aftermath of the 1980 military coup. The unions that were allowed to
exist were company and military-approved 'unions'. Their purpose was to
ride herd on the workers, put a damper on militancy, keep production
running and ensure that company profits were protected. In addition to
these company unions, the military-written constitution of 1982 severely
curtailed workers' rights. The result is that today only 8% of Turkey's
workers are union members, only about 4.5% are covered by union
contracts, and most of the major unions defend the company's interests
more than they do the workers'. It is in this context that the wildcat
strike of autoworkers can best be understood.

These wildcat strikes have been a wake-up call to both workers and their
bosses. The speed with which the strike spread and the resolve shown by
the workers shows an incredible courage that has been an inspiration to
the downtrodden Turkish working class and a message to Turkey's
powerful business class. No matter the results of the June 7th election,
we can expect that those who work to create Turkey's wealth will be
flexing their muscles and demanding that their voices be heard.

How industry, law firms and the European Commission worked
together on EU “trade secrets” legislation - a threat to consumers,
journalists, whistleblowers, researchers and workers.

Summary:
This report (pdf version) is based on the analysis of hundreds of documents, obtained
through an access to documents request, exchanged between the European
Commission's DG Internal Market and the main corporate lobby groups
involved in the development of the EU's draft legislation on so-called
“trade secrets”.

Industry's main message throughout the process has been that trade
secret theft is a major threat to the EU economy that demands a
legislative initiative to improve and harmonise rules on the matter.
Industry's recommended approach for this was to define trade secrets as a
form of intellectual property (IP).
From the very beginning the Commission took a strong interest in the
idea and went on to collect the evidence it needed to demonstrate that
legal "fragmentation" and trade secret theft would, indeed, be a threat.
But it outsourced the research to law firms that have a structural
interest in the development of new legal protection tools for their
corporate clients. In the end, industry and the Commission acted
together, working hand in hand on the methodology of the very evidence
collection for the research, jointly organising a “Commission conference
on trade secrets”, even coordinating media outreach on one occasion.

Eventually, the Commission followed industry's demands almost
completely, stopping short of creating a new IP category for trade
secrets in the EU but granting the associated means of legal redress.
The collaboration between DG Internal Market and the lobby groups
seems to have extended to lobbying the other DGs, jointly preparing the
submission to the Commission's Impact Assessment Board, and lobbying the
two other EU legislators, the Council of Ministers (Member States) and
the European Parliament.

When asked, the Commission did not dispute much of the above and
failed to see how working for three years on a quasi-daily basis with
lobby groups could be a problem. Emails show the opposite is actually
true: the Commission, once the decision to initiate new legislation was
taken, actually needed industry lobby groups' help. The Commission for
example did pro-active outreach to business lobby groups to be sure that
as many companies as possible participated in the public consultation.
Non-industry groups were completely absent from the Commission's
drafting process until the public consultation, and no pro-active
outreach to them seems to have been undertaken by the Commission.

Three other important observations should be made about this correspondence:

- Reference was often made to the upcoming TTIP negotiations to
justify the action, as comparable legal action was being drafted in the
US, and direct lobbying of TTIP negotiators to get trade secrets
protected as IP under TTIP was undertaken.

- Lobbying is made easier by the lack of capacity on the public side
of the discussion. Between 2010 and June 2012, only one policy officer
and his head of unit were in charge of the technical development of the
file, and in June 2012 one other policy officer joined them. Other
levels of the administration also intervened but at the management
level. On the other side, industry sent in teams of consultants, lawyers
and executives, background legal research, field examples, and senior
academic contacts –all free of charge for the Commission.

- To the Commission's credit, there are at least two moments in the
correspondence where the head of unit objected to industry proposals
that went too far from a political independence point of view (a meeting
proposal from the fragrance industry to discuss a template draft
legislation, and angry remarks about suspicious-looking exchanges
between the law firm working for the Commission (Baker & McKenzie)
and lobby groups active on the file), but his staff never wrote anything
of the sort. On the contrary, there are several instances where they
actually facilitated the lobbying work of industry by introducing
various lobby groups and the consultants working for the Commission to
one another. Who doesn't appreciate competent free help for one's work?